Aarthi Agarwal HD Wallpapers
Selasa, 30 April 2013
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The Pattern that Connects
Sabtu, 27 April 2013
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komentar
Gregory Bateson's famous but somewhat mystical phrase raises as many questions as it attempts to address. In essence it is an appeal for holism - particularly the kind of holism that cybernetics specialises in: the reduction of the world to the interactions of recursive processes. In this sense, 'pattern' is an allusion to 'abstraction' - the description of a mechanism. Bateson himself created many abstractions: 'double description', 'double bind', 'levels of learning', 'schizmogenesis', etc. In his language, these things are seen to be patterns by virtue of the fact that they repeat themselves at different levels of recursion, and much of his work was focused on unpicking the presence of these patterns in biological, sociological, anthropological and mathematical/logical domains.
Holism, as understood by cybernetics, is precisely this identification of recursive repetition, or 'patterning'. The cybernetic abstraction is the 'explanatory principle' (another Bateson term) which is applicable at many levels: a "defensible metaphor", as Pask would say.
But I'm wondering if this is a particular understanding of holism. The question is "does this understanding of holism leave anything out?" I'm worried that it might.
My worry is grounded in a suspicion that the holistic explanatory aspiration of cybernetics cannot account for the personal desire to hold to a holistic explanatory principle. Erich Fromm wrote about this is "Haben und Sein". He points out that there is much in theological discourse that guards against the kind of Faustian ambition of being able to explain everything - to "have" an explanation. It's probably better to "be" an explanation (although that's hard to explain!) - it's the kind of thing that Jesus or Buddha attempted to get across.
It all comes back to our relationship with abstraction. I've struggled with this, and if I attempt to 'explain' abstraction, then I'm thinking of saying:
Abstractions have to be learnt by others. Indeed, if they are not taught and learnt, there is no point to them. So I'm also thinking of saying:
It's very much like the relationship between music as played and music as notated. A performance is the process of creating redundancy from the abstraction of the score. Notation - which is the hard job of all composers - is the process of distilling experience into notated redundancies. [this is helping me think about my own difficulties in composition]
Bateson does talk about the relationship between classification and process (in "Mind and Nature" - where he reproduces this diagram from his anthropological work)
Holism, as understood by cybernetics, is precisely this identification of recursive repetition, or 'patterning'. The cybernetic abstraction is the 'explanatory principle' (another Bateson term) which is applicable at many levels: a "defensible metaphor", as Pask would say.
But I'm wondering if this is a particular understanding of holism. The question is "does this understanding of holism leave anything out?" I'm worried that it might.
My worry is grounded in a suspicion that the holistic explanatory aspiration of cybernetics cannot account for the personal desire to hold to a holistic explanatory principle. Erich Fromm wrote about this is "Haben und Sein". He points out that there is much in theological discourse that guards against the kind of Faustian ambition of being able to explain everything - to "have" an explanation. It's probably better to "be" an explanation (although that's hard to explain!) - it's the kind of thing that Jesus or Buddha attempted to get across.
It all comes back to our relationship with abstraction. I've struggled with this, and if I attempt to 'explain' abstraction, then I'm thinking of saying:
"abstraction is the removal of redundancy from the flow of experience"But abstraction creates its own flow of experience. So no abstraction can be complete. We're into a territory that requires a kind of Cantor-like diagonal argument...
Abstractions have to be learnt by others. Indeed, if they are not taught and learnt, there is no point to them. So I'm also thinking of saying:
"learning an abstraction is a process of recreating the redundancy that was removed in the abstracting process"and what about teaching?
"teaching is the process of creating the conditions for the production of redundancies related to a particular abstraction"but this is all getting a bit abstract!
It's very much like the relationship between music as played and music as notated. A performance is the process of creating redundancy from the abstraction of the score. Notation - which is the hard job of all composers - is the process of distilling experience into notated redundancies. [this is helping me think about my own difficulties in composition]
Bateson does talk about the relationship between classification and process (in "Mind and Nature" - where he reproduces this diagram from his anthropological work)
But the essence of the problem with abstaction (essence is another abstraction!) is that we lose sight of our own personhood, and the particular importance of "love" in being a person. As Faust realised, it is impossible to get beyond love, and whilst it is tempting to abstract it away (to remove its redundancy), to do this is to remove our humanity. If I say that "love is only redundancy" it reminds me of the damage that abstractions can do (although "loving" is partly "abstracting"...)
We cannot know the pattern which connects. But we can know the source of our desires to abstract knowledge. Knowing this, we might know ourselves and each other better. Then we might be in a position not to abstract further, but to do the opposite. To love the world more and to create redundancy.
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Categories:
Pattern
Kamis, 25 April 2013
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komentar
When we see a pattern, what we really see is redundancy.
A
is not a pattern. but
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
is.
all those As are not that dissimilar from the Fs here...
The one A (or the one F) can summarise the pattern. But if we say
A x 15
that doesn't have the same patterning as
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
but...
A x 15, A x 14, A x 13, A x 12...
does!
(but at a different level)
Is the difference between abstraction and experience the difference between levels of redundancy?
When we abstract, we remove redundancy. That's what happens in Schenker's analyses (this one of Bach's first prelude):
The key redundant component removed in all of this is:
With Schenker, it simply becomes a C-major chord. But if it was really just a C-major chord, it would be a very boring piece!
Redundancy shapes its form. Creation is a process of redundancy generation: ABABABABCABABBABAABABC... (and so on!)
How does this work? The question is about the relationship between redundancy and novelty: when things are redundant, they create the conditions for something new.
Today, Spain's unemployment statistics are 27%. That's a lot of redundancy. Maybe that is also the condition for something new. (let us hope it is beautiful rather than ugly!)
I suspect that redundancy creates novelty through a kind of catalytic process (Terry Deacon has got Autocatalysis just about right, I think). With a lot of catalysts in the air, an unexpected reaction becomes more probable, suddenly sparking into life from nowhere. Something new causes a reorganisation of expectations: this is when we know something is meaningful. The new thing causes everything else to be re-cast. Then new redundancies can grow, and the process begins again. It's tension and release.
Schenker was right about layers though. This (I think) is the emergent irreducible stratification of experience. In this way, we remember motifs, tonalities, progressions, etc - they become irreducible components: almost like the "code" or the components of a grammar. The emergence of the code, and the expression of statements within it produces new absences.
There is a magical moment, however, when an old code is completely transformed into something different...
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Categories:
Forms of Knowledge and Forms of Interaction: Some thinking about MOOCs
Selasa, 23 April 2013
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komentar
What is the relationship between the 'aboutness' of something - the topic - and the way a topic is engaged with, or the way it is taught?
MOOCs are an opportunity to study this. Since they encompass the range of the curriculum, and since their operation is largely transparent, some easy comparisons can be made. Whether MOOCs are any good or not (in general) is perhaps beside the point. Indeed, delivering content is probably not in the deep business model of MOOC corporations (I suspect they are instead a back-door to providing 'shared services' for Universities.. but that's another post!). But taken as a content-providing platform, which is how they appear at the moment, there is - I think - something to study.
The idea that different subjects have different 'forms' is an idea that goes back to Plato. In the 1970s Paul Hirst wrote a very influential paper on "forms of knowledge" which still creates a lot of interest (why?). Hirst's focus is largely on the conceptual structure of knowledge. There is less emphasis on the activities that are engaged in when learning within a domain of knowledge (although he does acknowledge the specialised "skills and techniques for exploring and testing").
I have been interested in Forms of Knowledge for a while (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/hirsts-forms-of-knowledge.html and http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/teleodynamics-and-forms-of-knowledge.html). But whilst the structuring of concepts may be important, I think the activities by which something is taught is equally important. A music lesson is characterised as much by the activities with which a teacher will typically engage the class (composing, improvising, etc) as a maths lesson is framed by its activities (doing exercises) or a computing lesson (writing a program, listening to theory)
Not all MOOCs are the same. I must admit I've tended to focus on the bad stuff in the past - the boring web pages with too much text and too little thought about the experience of reading it. But it needn't be like this. And, if the MOOC experiment is going to succeed, there is likely to be considerable diversity in the ways that teachers approach teaching online, or the kinds of activities they engage their students in. Moreover, the innovative stuff isn't going to be confined to Coursera or EdX or even ds106. Leading academics are setting up blogs as effective MOOCs for people to come together to do close-readings of new work (see for example Geoff Hodgson's blog for his new book "Darwin's Conjecture": http://darwinsconjecture.wordpress.com/about/). Eventually I guess the hype will die down and people will realise it's a web-page... but the hype will have changed us to the point that the idea of large-scale online engagement with teaching is less strange. (Of course when the MOOC mystique has gone, Coursera will be undercutting the University Student Information Systems companies because they will have positioned themselves as the market-leader for student authentication services!)
In this diverse and now easily examinable world, there are new distinctions to be drawn - particularly distinctions about the kinds of activities and interactivity that learners are engaged in, and the relationship between those activities and the knowledge domain pertaining to them. Fundamentally, this is about the way teachers manage 'variety' (a cybernetic concept - typically used as the 'unit of complexity'). How is the complexity of the subject managed through activity? How is the complexity of the students managed with the technology? How is assessment organised (if it is used)? How is progress monitored? How are individual needs addressed? and so on. And most fundamentally, "what is the experience?"
Some of these questions have been addressed in work on "Learning Design" (particularly the Educational Modelling Language). But that work, on the whole, takes a rather shallow view of what actually happens between learners and teachers in the classroom (it just considers that teachers coordinate activities). With MOOCs there are deeper things we can measure. These certainly go beyond the rather basic and crude 'analytics' that is much talked about in MOOCs. There are ways of analysing the content; there are ways of analysing the tools; there are ways of analysing the activities (I would recommend Klaus Krippendorff's work as a starting point with regard to the tools and the content).
I also think there is an opportunity for deeper thinking about the ontology of learning. What interests me most is the possibility of overturning a fundamentally positivist epistemology (despite the fact that it's dressed up as 'constructivism'). It may be that the MOOC experiment can reveal to us just how important what "isn't there" - within a teaching and learning situation - is! (It may be the "negative ground" of interaction which is the most important factor in effective engagement.)
MOOCs are an opportunity to study this. Since they encompass the range of the curriculum, and since their operation is largely transparent, some easy comparisons can be made. Whether MOOCs are any good or not (in general) is perhaps beside the point. Indeed, delivering content is probably not in the deep business model of MOOC corporations (I suspect they are instead a back-door to providing 'shared services' for Universities.. but that's another post!). But taken as a content-providing platform, which is how they appear at the moment, there is - I think - something to study.
The idea that different subjects have different 'forms' is an idea that goes back to Plato. In the 1970s Paul Hirst wrote a very influential paper on "forms of knowledge" which still creates a lot of interest (why?). Hirst's focus is largely on the conceptual structure of knowledge. There is less emphasis on the activities that are engaged in when learning within a domain of knowledge (although he does acknowledge the specialised "skills and techniques for exploring and testing").
I have been interested in Forms of Knowledge for a while (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/hirsts-forms-of-knowledge.html and http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/teleodynamics-and-forms-of-knowledge.html). But whilst the structuring of concepts may be important, I think the activities by which something is taught is equally important. A music lesson is characterised as much by the activities with which a teacher will typically engage the class (composing, improvising, etc) as a maths lesson is framed by its activities (doing exercises) or a computing lesson (writing a program, listening to theory)
Not all MOOCs are the same. I must admit I've tended to focus on the bad stuff in the past - the boring web pages with too much text and too little thought about the experience of reading it. But it needn't be like this. And, if the MOOC experiment is going to succeed, there is likely to be considerable diversity in the ways that teachers approach teaching online, or the kinds of activities they engage their students in. Moreover, the innovative stuff isn't going to be confined to Coursera or EdX or even ds106. Leading academics are setting up blogs as effective MOOCs for people to come together to do close-readings of new work (see for example Geoff Hodgson's blog for his new book "Darwin's Conjecture": http://darwinsconjecture.wordpress.com/about/). Eventually I guess the hype will die down and people will realise it's a web-page... but the hype will have changed us to the point that the idea of large-scale online engagement with teaching is less strange. (Of course when the MOOC mystique has gone, Coursera will be undercutting the University Student Information Systems companies because they will have positioned themselves as the market-leader for student authentication services!)
In this diverse and now easily examinable world, there are new distinctions to be drawn - particularly distinctions about the kinds of activities and interactivity that learners are engaged in, and the relationship between those activities and the knowledge domain pertaining to them. Fundamentally, this is about the way teachers manage 'variety' (a cybernetic concept - typically used as the 'unit of complexity'). How is the complexity of the subject managed through activity? How is the complexity of the students managed with the technology? How is assessment organised (if it is used)? How is progress monitored? How are individual needs addressed? and so on. And most fundamentally, "what is the experience?"
Some of these questions have been addressed in work on "Learning Design" (particularly the Educational Modelling Language). But that work, on the whole, takes a rather shallow view of what actually happens between learners and teachers in the classroom (it just considers that teachers coordinate activities). With MOOCs there are deeper things we can measure. These certainly go beyond the rather basic and crude 'analytics' that is much talked about in MOOCs. There are ways of analysing the content; there are ways of analysing the tools; there are ways of analysing the activities (I would recommend Klaus Krippendorff's work as a starting point with regard to the tools and the content).
I also think there is an opportunity for deeper thinking about the ontology of learning. What interests me most is the possibility of overturning a fundamentally positivist epistemology (despite the fact that it's dressed up as 'constructivism'). It may be that the MOOC experiment can reveal to us just how important what "isn't there" - within a teaching and learning situation - is! (It may be the "negative ground" of interaction which is the most important factor in effective engagement.)
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Categories:
From Information to Learning: Why Shannon is important and what it means for Educational Technology
Sabtu, 20 April 2013
0
komentar
Shannon's information theory as presented in his and Warren Weaver's "Mathematical Theory of Communication" still stands as one of the great intellectual monuments of the 20th century. Indeed, when we consider that the technologies of the internet rely fundamentally on his re-application of Boltzman's statistical thermodynamics, his social impact is of Einsteinian proportions. When things become that familiar, it is easy to forget what they were really about, and what problems they attempted to solve. Now, when 'information' appears all around us, when our learning is becoming dependent on the information we are able to discover as much as the colleges and teachers we meet, when we have become much more aware of our own 'information literacy' (whatever that means!), when we have become more aware of the relationship between the decisions we make and the information presented to us, when 'misinformation' is a stock-in-trade of corporations of political parties, etc., etc., it's worth thinking about what Shannon was saying.
What he wasn't saying was anything about "meaning" (although Weaver had a different view). Shannon made a distinction between information and meaning - information, essentially, was defined in a fairly tight description of a set of statistical probabilities of message transmission and reception: essentially information related to the uncertainty involved in predicting the value of a random item of information. The measure of this uncertainty Shannon, following Boltzman, called 'entropy'. His equation borrowed Boltzman's equation which described the uncertainty of predicting the state of matter at a particular point. Shannon's equation instead showed the minimum number of 'bits' that would be required to transmit a message. Sending the message with more bits was to add redundancy. His insight was to see that Boltzman's work on physics had application to communicating signals through a medium.
When we think about learning, however, it's "meaning" that counts. Any teacher knows that they can't just throw information at their students - if it doesn't mean anything to those students, they won't learning anything. The 'meaning' of Boltzman's state of matter is transferred to us because we can see that such and such is 'hot': we might touch it and say "ouch!". We might then relate our experience of "ouch!" to the statistical formulation presented by Boltzman - particularly if only part of the material makes us go "ouch!". What is the equivalent of "ouch!" in Shannon's theory? Since Shannon's equation is a measure of uncertainty, maybe the "ouch?" moment is a moment of confusion.
His point is that communication occurs through fluctuating patterns of uncertainty. Indeed, if you can encode the fluctuating patterns of uncertainty and code them, you may be able to 'compress' the message communicated. This is the basic principle behind entropy encoding algorithms like the Huffman algorithm (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding) which is used in the file 'zip' process. But it is important to understand what the Huffman algorithm gives us. Communication is successful because there is sufficient redundancy to guarantee transmission over a 'noisy' medium. Huffman eliminates the redundancy encoding the spread of probabilities that could be communicated if the medium was clear. This will lead to the communication of the message, but without the redundancy. We see that the message is the same because we can convert the Huffman code back into the message. Some redundancy is reapplied in the decoding of the message.
No human being works at the basis of a Huffman code. Does meaning require redundancy? Does redundancy contribute to the pattern of uncertainty? Consider a noisy environment. and person X chooses to shout to person Z above the crowd. Person Y, on the other hand, beckons to Z to move into a quieter environment. What's happening here? Partly, we might say that there is a selection of different "channel": the auditory channel is too noisy for Y so they use the visual channel (I don't like the idea of channels but it works in this example). But there is more than the selection of the channel. There are messages galore in this situation depending on the sender and receiver. The receiver of X's shouting will receive a message like "this person's a fool if they think they can shout above this!"; the receiver of Y's visual signals might equally think "yes, we need to find a way of eliminating the noise". In human communication, noise affects the selection of the message as well as its transmission. Why does this happen?
One way of explaining this is to suggest that anticipation of the likelihood that a message will be successfully received and the communication is successful is fundamental. That calculation involves a selection of the message, a consideration of the medium (the noise), and some acknowledgement of the capacity of the receiver ("how are they likely to respond?"). Such a calculation requires a degree of reflexivity by the sender as they consider the options for making an utterance ("what should I say? how should I say it? how are they likely to respond in each case?")
The criteria for deciding a particular utterance over any other is the maximising of the probability of successful communication. The communication which is going to be most successful is the communication which has the maximum redundancy.
This sounds simple. But much communication doesn't work - particularly in education. Why is that? The reason must be that it is very difficult to assess the capacity of the receiver (students) to guess their likely response. Indeed, much that happens in education isn't communication! Whilst in face-to-face learning communication, it is possible to assess the noise, in online communication, this too is impossible. Online, the receiver is also even more of a black box. But that doesn't explain things completely. The deep problem is that transmitters (teachers) work with constraints which mean that they can become blind to certain options for communication which might be more successful. Custom and practice, assessment regimes, institutional protocol, power relations, personal histories, and (more than anything) fear all feed into this.
Personal constraints can affect the process of selecting the utterance with the maximum redundancy. The communication with the maximum redundancy is the communication that isn't there - with that communication there is no knowable message, so all signals are effectively "redundant". This is the communication which is absent. Identifying the communication which isn't there means looking at the 'negative' images of the possible communications which are imaginable. That means examining the constraints upon the transmitters communication, and considering the likely constraints bearing upon the receiver. By considering the negative image of communication, a new kind of utterance can emerge. This is a determination of the 'absences' which unite sender and receiver. In my example, Y's use of the visual channel is a good example: visual communication was absent, and Y's gestures turn the visual channel into a communication channel which is understood by both parties, considering the noise in the environment.
Person Y does more than just identify a new channel. They create new redundancies with their new language. In fact, they create lots of new redundancies, since their message is very simple, but their gestures are likely to be quite elaborate.
So there is a process of identifying the communication that isn't there (the shared absence), which creates the maximally redundant communication. Beyond that, with the emergence of a new language, new redundancies are further produced.
I think this process lies at the heart of creativity in teaching and learning. It is the off-the-wall gestures of teachers in tearing-up the rule-book (that's the book which constrains the messages!) that reinvigorates the communication. Those gestures only happen if teachers can inspect their own constraints as a way of identifying the maximally redundant communication. That shared absence then catalyzes new communications whose form (with their redundancies) gradually emerge. The deep question for online educators is how this can be done online - where the protocols are so rigid and where it is difficult (but not impossible) to step outside the box.
But perhaps what is most interesting in this is that there is a direct link between Shannon's insights into information and something more deeply human and creative.
What he wasn't saying was anything about "meaning" (although Weaver had a different view). Shannon made a distinction between information and meaning - information, essentially, was defined in a fairly tight description of a set of statistical probabilities of message transmission and reception: essentially information related to the uncertainty involved in predicting the value of a random item of information. The measure of this uncertainty Shannon, following Boltzman, called 'entropy'. His equation borrowed Boltzman's equation which described the uncertainty of predicting the state of matter at a particular point. Shannon's equation instead showed the minimum number of 'bits' that would be required to transmit a message. Sending the message with more bits was to add redundancy. His insight was to see that Boltzman's work on physics had application to communicating signals through a medium.
When we think about learning, however, it's "meaning" that counts. Any teacher knows that they can't just throw information at their students - if it doesn't mean anything to those students, they won't learning anything. The 'meaning' of Boltzman's state of matter is transferred to us because we can see that such and such is 'hot': we might touch it and say "ouch!". We might then relate our experience of "ouch!" to the statistical formulation presented by Boltzman - particularly if only part of the material makes us go "ouch!". What is the equivalent of "ouch!" in Shannon's theory? Since Shannon's equation is a measure of uncertainty, maybe the "ouch?" moment is a moment of confusion.
His point is that communication occurs through fluctuating patterns of uncertainty. Indeed, if you can encode the fluctuating patterns of uncertainty and code them, you may be able to 'compress' the message communicated. This is the basic principle behind entropy encoding algorithms like the Huffman algorithm (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding) which is used in the file 'zip' process. But it is important to understand what the Huffman algorithm gives us. Communication is successful because there is sufficient redundancy to guarantee transmission over a 'noisy' medium. Huffman eliminates the redundancy encoding the spread of probabilities that could be communicated if the medium was clear. This will lead to the communication of the message, but without the redundancy. We see that the message is the same because we can convert the Huffman code back into the message. Some redundancy is reapplied in the decoding of the message.
No human being works at the basis of a Huffman code. Does meaning require redundancy? Does redundancy contribute to the pattern of uncertainty? Consider a noisy environment. and person X chooses to shout to person Z above the crowd. Person Y, on the other hand, beckons to Z to move into a quieter environment. What's happening here? Partly, we might say that there is a selection of different "channel": the auditory channel is too noisy for Y so they use the visual channel (I don't like the idea of channels but it works in this example). But there is more than the selection of the channel. There are messages galore in this situation depending on the sender and receiver. The receiver of X's shouting will receive a message like "this person's a fool if they think they can shout above this!"; the receiver of Y's visual signals might equally think "yes, we need to find a way of eliminating the noise". In human communication, noise affects the selection of the message as well as its transmission. Why does this happen?
One way of explaining this is to suggest that anticipation of the likelihood that a message will be successfully received and the communication is successful is fundamental. That calculation involves a selection of the message, a consideration of the medium (the noise), and some acknowledgement of the capacity of the receiver ("how are they likely to respond?"). Such a calculation requires a degree of reflexivity by the sender as they consider the options for making an utterance ("what should I say? how should I say it? how are they likely to respond in each case?")
The criteria for deciding a particular utterance over any other is the maximising of the probability of successful communication. The communication which is going to be most successful is the communication which has the maximum redundancy.
This sounds simple. But much communication doesn't work - particularly in education. Why is that? The reason must be that it is very difficult to assess the capacity of the receiver (students) to guess their likely response. Indeed, much that happens in education isn't communication! Whilst in face-to-face learning communication, it is possible to assess the noise, in online communication, this too is impossible. Online, the receiver is also even more of a black box. But that doesn't explain things completely. The deep problem is that transmitters (teachers) work with constraints which mean that they can become blind to certain options for communication which might be more successful. Custom and practice, assessment regimes, institutional protocol, power relations, personal histories, and (more than anything) fear all feed into this.
Personal constraints can affect the process of selecting the utterance with the maximum redundancy. The communication with the maximum redundancy is the communication that isn't there - with that communication there is no knowable message, so all signals are effectively "redundant". This is the communication which is absent. Identifying the communication which isn't there means looking at the 'negative' images of the possible communications which are imaginable. That means examining the constraints upon the transmitters communication, and considering the likely constraints bearing upon the receiver. By considering the negative image of communication, a new kind of utterance can emerge. This is a determination of the 'absences' which unite sender and receiver. In my example, Y's use of the visual channel is a good example: visual communication was absent, and Y's gestures turn the visual channel into a communication channel which is understood by both parties, considering the noise in the environment.
Person Y does more than just identify a new channel. They create new redundancies with their new language. In fact, they create lots of new redundancies, since their message is very simple, but their gestures are likely to be quite elaborate.
So there is a process of identifying the communication that isn't there (the shared absence), which creates the maximally redundant communication. Beyond that, with the emergence of a new language, new redundancies are further produced.
I think this process lies at the heart of creativity in teaching and learning. It is the off-the-wall gestures of teachers in tearing-up the rule-book (that's the book which constrains the messages!) that reinvigorates the communication. Those gestures only happen if teachers can inspect their own constraints as a way of identifying the maximally redundant communication. That shared absence then catalyzes new communications whose form (with their redundancies) gradually emerge. The deep question for online educators is how this can be done online - where the protocols are so rigid and where it is difficult (but not impossible) to step outside the box.
But perhaps what is most interesting in this is that there is a direct link between Shannon's insights into information and something more deeply human and creative.
Baca Selengkapnya ....
Categories:
Information and Emancipation
Minggu, 14 April 2013
0
komentar
Is a theory of information futile? There's something of a Zeno's paradox about it all: we can pursue Shannon, or Deacon, or Floridi, or whoever else braves this territory. But there's always an unexplored aspect. Is it the physics, or the biology, or the sociology, or the pedagogy? Exploring information is rather like exploring education - it is torn apart by the various disciplines that have a stake in it - which is all of them.
I think there is a central conflation in all attempts at information theory. That is a conflation between describing the mechanism of emergence, and the mechanism of experience. Cybernetic theories tend towards conflating emergence with experience in a causal circularity. But what of the experience of engaging with the theory? That inevitably is outside the circularity.
Experience is personal. There is no reduction possible beyond our living as people, persons in a social world, with parents and families and loves and beliefs. However, to believe that there are possible reductions is part of our personhood. Yet such a belief is subject to the forces which shape our personhood.
Emergence is a way of explaining how things comes to be. As persons, explanations are important to us. They help us act in the world. Explaining how things come to be is how we understand the nature of things. Acting in the knowledge of the nature of things is likely to be more effective than acting in ignorance of the nature of things. (all sorts of silly examples can be used to illustrate that point!)
Information is produced by an act. We might explain how that act may have occurred - what its emergent causes were. Only the person committing the act can know the experience - and even their retrospective analysis of the act is not the same as the act itself.
But an act is the result of a decision. Decisions, as I argued yesterday (and have been arguing for some time) result from absences. A decision (and therefore by extension, information) emerges from a mechanism involving absence, but a decision is also irreducible.
Is information irreducible? Surely, that's nonsense. After all, the chief value of information is that it can be 'gathered', 'compared', 'collated', 'organised', etc! At the same time, however, we also know about the deficiencies of our gathering and comparing and organising. It creates great analytical problems for us as we seek to find new sophisticated algorithms to unpick the 'meaning' of the information. In the process, we move further away from the everyday world of the senses into an abstract world of data.
Information may well be irreducible. It may be that when we correlate data, we actually coordinate around absences. Both apples and pears may be negatively defined: the characteristic features whose absence determines that x can be nothing but an apple or a pear. Yet at the same time, there are the characteristic features whose absence determines that x can be nothing other than an apple-pear. (c.f. Wittgenstein's 'family resemblances') But the point is that the absence processing goes on in us. It is not in the data.
What bears upon the processes of absence determination in the correlation of data? Well, there are the cumulative absences that each of us carry from our lives. No-one can quite know what they are. But there are certain to be some common themes: death, attachment, love, sex, religion, and so on. They are almost always there at some level in the negative ground of our being. There is an aspect of data correlation which is a determination of a part of absence which in turn is a recognition of our shared biology.
But those things about togetherness, attachment, identification with the species are so fundamental - even in processes of data correlation. The most impressive thing I find in Grounded Theory (which otherwise I find quite troubling) is the emphasis that is made on 'living with the data'. That is the process of attuning absences to acts which caused data to be produced.
But personal and social ontology, personal history and behaviour all count. Absences point towards emancipation; towards the critique of prohibition. Information is the result of absences: data is produced by acts determined by what isn't there. Analysis is an act too. It too produces information. Personal absences matter at all levels. That means that at all levels, it is an acknowledgement and inspection of absence, not information, which is continually required.
Deep information theory is not a theory of information; it is a theory of absence. Absence is real, whereas information is merely an epiphenomenon of the effect of absence on decisions. If we privilege information, we risk enslaving ourselves to a false ontology. We risk denying fundamental parts of our personhood whose denial contributes to poor decisions (particularly poor analytical decisions).
By privileging absence, an account of the emergence of information can be created. This would relate information to decision and action. It would see information as irreducible yet account for the mechanisms whereby information can be correlated. But most importantly, in drawing attention to the root cause of stratified information and the emergent pathologies resulting from it, it can make the connection between ontological security and our treatment of information in the world around us. In this way, by privileging absence, an approach to information can be created which is explicitly infused with the emancipatory drive which unites the spreadsheet and the new technologies with the policy and its effects.
That, I think, is a path worth taking. For not only does it give us an approach to information that is hopeful rather than dismal, it also gives us a way of thinking about technology (which is also a determination of absence) and social change. Absence, I believe, may be important in re-engaging the political sphere in the business of information and technology.
I think there is a central conflation in all attempts at information theory. That is a conflation between describing the mechanism of emergence, and the mechanism of experience. Cybernetic theories tend towards conflating emergence with experience in a causal circularity. But what of the experience of engaging with the theory? That inevitably is outside the circularity.
Experience is personal. There is no reduction possible beyond our living as people, persons in a social world, with parents and families and loves and beliefs. However, to believe that there are possible reductions is part of our personhood. Yet such a belief is subject to the forces which shape our personhood.
Emergence is a way of explaining how things comes to be. As persons, explanations are important to us. They help us act in the world. Explaining how things come to be is how we understand the nature of things. Acting in the knowledge of the nature of things is likely to be more effective than acting in ignorance of the nature of things. (all sorts of silly examples can be used to illustrate that point!)
Information is produced by an act. We might explain how that act may have occurred - what its emergent causes were. Only the person committing the act can know the experience - and even their retrospective analysis of the act is not the same as the act itself.
But an act is the result of a decision. Decisions, as I argued yesterday (and have been arguing for some time) result from absences. A decision (and therefore by extension, information) emerges from a mechanism involving absence, but a decision is also irreducible.
Is information irreducible? Surely, that's nonsense. After all, the chief value of information is that it can be 'gathered', 'compared', 'collated', 'organised', etc! At the same time, however, we also know about the deficiencies of our gathering and comparing and organising. It creates great analytical problems for us as we seek to find new sophisticated algorithms to unpick the 'meaning' of the information. In the process, we move further away from the everyday world of the senses into an abstract world of data.
Information may well be irreducible. It may be that when we correlate data, we actually coordinate around absences. Both apples and pears may be negatively defined: the characteristic features whose absence determines that x can be nothing but an apple or a pear. Yet at the same time, there are the characteristic features whose absence determines that x can be nothing other than an apple-pear. (c.f. Wittgenstein's 'family resemblances') But the point is that the absence processing goes on in us. It is not in the data.
What bears upon the processes of absence determination in the correlation of data? Well, there are the cumulative absences that each of us carry from our lives. No-one can quite know what they are. But there are certain to be some common themes: death, attachment, love, sex, religion, and so on. They are almost always there at some level in the negative ground of our being. There is an aspect of data correlation which is a determination of a part of absence which in turn is a recognition of our shared biology.
But those things about togetherness, attachment, identification with the species are so fundamental - even in processes of data correlation. The most impressive thing I find in Grounded Theory (which otherwise I find quite troubling) is the emphasis that is made on 'living with the data'. That is the process of attuning absences to acts which caused data to be produced.
But personal and social ontology, personal history and behaviour all count. Absences point towards emancipation; towards the critique of prohibition. Information is the result of absences: data is produced by acts determined by what isn't there. Analysis is an act too. It too produces information. Personal absences matter at all levels. That means that at all levels, it is an acknowledgement and inspection of absence, not information, which is continually required.
Deep information theory is not a theory of information; it is a theory of absence. Absence is real, whereas information is merely an epiphenomenon of the effect of absence on decisions. If we privilege information, we risk enslaving ourselves to a false ontology. We risk denying fundamental parts of our personhood whose denial contributes to poor decisions (particularly poor analytical decisions).
By privileging absence, an account of the emergence of information can be created. This would relate information to decision and action. It would see information as irreducible yet account for the mechanisms whereby information can be correlated. But most importantly, in drawing attention to the root cause of stratified information and the emergent pathologies resulting from it, it can make the connection between ontological security and our treatment of information in the world around us. In this way, by privileging absence, an approach to information can be created which is explicitly infused with the emancipatory drive which unites the spreadsheet and the new technologies with the policy and its effects.
That, I think, is a path worth taking. For not only does it give us an approach to information that is hopeful rather than dismal, it also gives us a way of thinking about technology (which is also a determination of absence) and social change. Absence, I believe, may be important in re-engaging the political sphere in the business of information and technology.
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